Excel Filtering Phantoms

April 6, 2005 4:00 PM

I was hoping someone might have insight into why, when I filter row of text in Excel for Unique Values, i.e., no duplicates displayed, I still get some duplicate rows. Has anyone experienced this? Again, it's text that I'm working with; not numbers.
posted by ParisParamus to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I've often experienced what odinsdream describes. It's always a little hidden apostrophe or comma that for some reason doesn't show up on the worksheet. Usually I find it happens when I'm copying/pasting or importing from Access.
posted by loquax at 6:01 PM on April 6, 2005

My guesses would be:

Lack of column headings (but excel should complain about this, and it should give you only one entry duplicated)
Whitespace (as mentioned)

I'll often just stick another column alongside the data, fill it with "=TRIM(cellreference)" and the copy/paste-special-as-values back over your original data.
posted by pompomtom at 7:28 PM on April 6, 2005

Response by poster: Hmmm....I just reformatted all cells as "text," and at least some of the duplicates disappeared. Maybe that did it?
posted by ParisParamus at 11:20 PM on April 6, 2005